


The Crow is Black (You Know My Love)

by Star_flaming



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, lots and lots of angst, only a moment of it at the very end though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 04:34:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6180343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_flaming/pseuds/Star_flaming
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Knights of Ren come bearing a body, and the General falls apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Crow is Black (You Know My Love)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the folk song "The Lonesome Dove"
> 
> Prompt here: http://tfa-kink.dreamwidth.org/3467.html?thread=6915723#cmt6915723

The Knights of Ren rarely travelled together. They were solitary figures who when they met up were swiftly seen on the battlefield, carnage all around them. They were coarse and rough and hard. This was known fact.

So that they were so quiet and gentle when they appeared on the _Finalizer_ was cause for some alarm. “General,” one had said, voice oddly soft behind their helmet. “Thank you for letting us aboard your ship. And I am sorry. Would you come with me?”

Hux straightened his back, refusing to look weak before anyone. Going with this Knight probably meant going to the execution he had been waiting for since Starkiller. Turning to his officers, it seemed they all had the same idea. No words were exchanged, but a short salute was. And that was all. There was no room for remorse, not in the face of the Supreme Leader’s judgment.

Following the Knight, Hux readied himself. He had left his mark on the Galaxy. Across the massive spread of stars that moment of destruction he had unleashed upon the Hosnian would be visible for the next two hundred years. The Outer Rim would see it last, great grandchildren looking through telescopes would see what Hux had done. No one else could claim that sort of rolling visibility. (Luke Skywalker could, much as he hated to say it. The explosions of both Death Stars were still visible from most of the Galaxy, that moment of destruction in the night skies for all to see.) He had to be content with that.

Stepping onto the shuttle the Knights had come on, he didn’t expect to see five of them standing there with their helmets off. Eyes darting from one to the next, horrified by how _young_ they all were (he had thought Kylo to be oddly young, but now he saw all the Knights were that age or even younger), he missed when the one who had escorted him removed her helmet. She was a pretty woman, it probably helped her with undercover missions. But her eyes were filled with sadness. “You’re going to want to prepare yourself, General,” she said.

“What for? I’m willing to accept my death,” said Hux. But the look on her face grew even more sad at that.

“We aren’t your executioners,” said another Knight, this one a young man. He gestured for Hux to follow him, and further into the shuttle they went.

It was designed to be able to travel for the same length of time as a freighter, but with more speed. It was sleek and smooth and promised to be quite comfortable, but Hux couldn’t recognize that, too uncertain about what he had agreed to, coming aboard like this. The Knights weren’t his executioners, alright fine, but that didn’t mean that someone wasn’t going to kill him. But he’d face it as he faced most other things, with pride and strength.

The Knight who led him stopped to open a door with his handprint, pausing to remove his glove to show a scar on the back of his hand. Without their helmets or weapons, Hux had no idea who was who, and didn’t dare insult them by assuming they were someone they weren’t. And perhaps that was by design.

But when the door was opened those thoughts were shocked out of him by how cold the room before him was. And when he looked in, he saw why.

There was a bier in the center of the room, and on it lay a body. Were the Knights presenting him dead things? Millicent did that enough when he was actually planetside where there were actually things for her to kill, he didn’t need that from the Knights of Ren too. “We’ll wait outside, General,” said the Knight who had let him in. His cue to enter.

Stepping inside, the door closed behind him, trapping him in the cold room. Hux approached the body slowly, unsure what had been brought for his inspection. Unless the Knights had suddenly grown to appreciate all life and were heartbroken over bringing him the body of FN-2187, Hux wasn’t sure this was worth his time.

The thoughts stopped, suddenly. Mind wiped clean by seeing pale skin and dark hair too long for regulation. Eyes he knew to be as dark as the void of space shut on either side of a too-large nose. Full lips closed. A face bisected by an uneven wound. This wasn’t FN-2187. This wasn’t anyone he ever wanted to have presented to him.

“No,” he breathed, only vaguely aware of what he was saying. “No. No, no, no, no you can’t…you…” But as he suddenly rushed to the body, for a moment sure that this was some sort of cruel joke, here was that lightsaber that had destroyed so much of his ship, folded under hands resting on the stomach. “No! You _can’t_ be dead! No!”

Pitiful denials, they did nothing. But Hux was beyond caring about what was appropriate, what was noble, or what was pitiful. All he cared about was that this cold room held the body of his once-lover. Screaming at the body that he hadn’t given _permission_ for Kylo to die, that was all he was capable of at the moment. Screaming his grief, screaming his pain, shaking the body as if he could just make Kylo _wake up_ from death, that was all he could do.

This was a man who had still been upright for far too long a time after being struck by a Wookie Bowcaster, this was a man who had _fought_ while so heavily injured and managed to get a solid half mile away from the Oscillator where he had been so heavily injured. This was a man who was upright again just a few days later to fly to Snoke. This man wasn’t _like_ other humans, he wasn’t subject to rules like the rest were. How could death keep him down?

Somewhere, in the midst of pain, he found himself clinging to Kylo’s shoulders, weeping with undignified wails muffled in the knight’s chest. But no arms held him, no dear deep voice murmured assurances. This was no cruel joke, Kylo was dead. The proof was under his hand where no pulse fluttered.

A hand touched his shoulder and Hux jolted away, trying in vain to pull himself together. But it was that young woman who had collected him, who had apologized on the bridge when Hux had been so sure it was his execution she was sorry about. “General,” she said, and he saw tears on her face. “We loved him too. Not the same, I know that, but we loved him too. That’s why we brought him here. We have each other, you don’t. You deserved to see him, and we all came so you wouldn’t be so totally alone.”

The others were with her, deep grief on their faces. Kylo had been their master, and apparently their friend as well if such grief was true. Not all were in tears, but Hux didn’t feel quite so childish for his with the others mourning clear as he was. “I loved him. I loved him so much,” he admitted. He hadn’t said such a declaration before, not even to Kylo. That hadn’t been how they were to each other. That hadn’t been who they were.

But how couldn’t he say it when he still clung to the man’s corpse?

The Knight (he really should learn their names, he thought distantly, hidden beneath the fog of grief) drew him into her arms. Another joined them, until seven bodies were tangled together in sorrow and their minds worse. At the base of Kylo’s bier they all knelt together, not one of them wanting to be alone.

It was a long moment before one of them said, “We were going to take him to cremation, General.”

“Not yet,” said Hux suddenly. He didn’t know why this was so important, it just was. Kylo’s body couldn’t be taken. “Not yet.”

“Alright. But we can only keep mourning so long.”

“Hush,” admonished another Knight. “Kylo was just as much to the General as he was to us. We’ve had time to mourn, he hasn’t. He’s due that just as much as we are. General, you tell us when you can get away. He wanted to be cremated on Endor, like his grandfather.”

Of course, Hux thought. Of course he did. The idea managed to bring a sort of laugh from him, too twisted up in a sob to be heard for what it was.

\------------

Six Knights of Ren stayed in the General’s quarters. No one questioned it out loud, but when the General came back looked shattered, they assumed that had something to do with it. No one got an answer though. At least three times a day Hux went to the shuttle the Knights had come on, sometimes accompanied by the knights, sometimes not, and came back in worse shape than he went in.

His people worried for him. But no one bothered him about it. Not when he was in near constant company of the Knights of Ren. As far as they knew, it was business with the Supreme Leader, how were they to know that each evening Hux let himself be drawn into the tangle the Knights arranged themselves in and wept when they showed him in his mind Kylo’s last days.

Snoke hadn’t cared about those awful injuries on Starkiller. Kylo had been worked to death, sepsis in the wounds bringing him down. It was so awful because it was such a _stupid, preventable_ death. Kylo shouldn’t be dead. If Snoke had thought to wait and let him heal instead of pressing him through pain, Kylo would have returned to him strong as ever.

Hux had loved Kylo, but they had known their master better than he ever did, and seeing the man’s professed fondness for wookie foods and commenting of how refreshing it was not to have to pick hairs out of it, it made him laugh and cry in equal measure. Kylo had always looked ill when he ate the bland cuisine those of the Order had grown up with. A childhood without spices next to one eating the too-hot wookie foods and building up such an immunity to capsaicin, Kylo would have laughed to serve those favorite foods to him, to watch Hux choke on flavor.

That image, he realized was a memory, from another Knight who had been born to the Order, one who had that same reaction, and Hux wept that those who had known Kylo infinitely better than himself were willing to share such memories. Hux was selfish, he wouldn’t have ever shared such moments of a hand up after being knocked down in training, moments of understanding when the nightmares got too bad, moments of guarding his back in battle.

He could and did pull himself in time for his shifts, but there was such an air of fragility about him that were he any further out of his grief he would have snapped that people were treating him as a breakable object for no reason.

But even planets broke.

\-------------

Hux was due for shore leave and the agreement was that he and the Knights would cremate Kylo on Endor then. And when the day came that they were due to leave, the Knights couldn’t find Hux anywhere, and eventually assumed he’d be on the shuttle already, spending the last moments he could in that cold room keeping Kylo from rotting, spending time with what was left of his lover.

And when the door was opened at least one of them cried out to see what was before them. Hux lay peacefully with Kylo, holding the Knight in his arms with all tenderness. But not a soul in that cold room breathed. A syringe lay nearby and a neat little puncture in the crook of Hux’s elbow gave a hint of what had happened.

This time it was high standing officers who were invited to that cold room to mourn their dead General. No one dared disturb the lovers from their embrace. Yet not one came to see the two cremated together. The First Order was of ice, not of fire, it seemed.

Hux had apparently spend his last hours with treasonous intent, for when the pyre was ready General Organa appeared, Resistance at her back, wailing to see her dead son. The Knights she acknowledged only as her son’s friends, and embraced them all, speaking of her intimate knowledge of loss and that sweet understanding driving so many of them to tears in return. She set the pyre, as mother, and with a Knight of Ren weeping into her shoulder swore that she’d kill the one who killed her son.

And now she had six Knights on her side.


End file.
